GRASP Laboratory at IROS 2026

Best Paper / Best Student Paper Award Finalist

*WINNER* Best Student Paper Award

Flatness-Preserving Residual Learning for Real-Time Tight Quadrotor Formation Flight

Pei-An Hsieh, Fengjun Yang, Nikolai Matni, M. Ani Hsieh

IROS Best Paper Award on Robot Mechanisms and Design, Sponsored by Cornerstone Robotics Finalist

*WINNER* Best Paper Award on Robot Mechanisms and Design

Design, Modeling, and Performance of a Robotic Zipper for Self-Donning Clothing

Amanda Weckerly, Wooseok Kim, Megan Coram, Ellen Li, Sophie Lin, Gabriel Unger, Isabella Szabo, Allison M. Okamura, Cynthia Sung

Foundation Models in Multi-Robot Systems Workshop

Best Paper Award

Multi-Robot Formation Coordination with Verified Agentic LLM Planning
Jinyuan Zhang, Yuwei Wu, Guangyao Shi, Jonathan Diller, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Vijay Kumar

2nd Workshop: Challenges and Applications Prospects for Reconfigurable Modular Robots

Organizers: Nils Roede, Mark Yim
Invited Speaker: Mark Yim, 9:45 AM to 10:15 AM: “Modular embodiment and self-reconfiguration: from lab prototypes to deployable systems”
9:00 AM to 9:15 AM – Paper Presentation I
ModSim: An Open-Source Framework for Dynamic Modular Robot Simulation
Angelina Wong, Akshay Ram Panyam, Nils Roede, Mark Yim

2nd Workshop on Real-World Challenges in Multi-Robot Cooperation: The Power of Heterogeneity and Diversity

Invited Speaker: M. Ani Hsieh
11:10 AM to 11:30 AM

Beyond Exteroception: Interoceptive Perception for Resilient Robotics

Invited Speaker: Daniel Gehrig, “Estimating Motion from Canonical, Proprioceptive Representations”
2:30 PM to 3:00 PM

Rethinking Uncertainty for Modern Robotics Paradigms

Invited Speaker: Dinesh Jayaraman
2:50 PM to 3:30 PM
Accepted Paper: Spatial-Semantic Uncertainty in VLM-Based Target Search: Balancing Exploration and Identification
Alkesh Kumar Srivastava, Jonathan Diller, Vijay Kumar, Philip Dames
Accepted Paper: Confidence-aware Articulated Object Manipulation
Yongseok Kwon, Rachel Holladay
Accepted Poster: Adaptive Surface Cleaning under Uncertain Cleaning Response
Ruichen Li, Rachel Holladay

Full-Shift Robot Co-Workers

Accepted Paper: AI Coaching Beyond Assisted Performance: Toward Independent Human Skill Development
Wei Wang, Enlin Gu, Antonio Loquercio, Haimin Hu, Rahul Mangharam

Out of the Lab: Personalization and Long-Term Use in Rehabilitation and Assistive Robotics

Invited Speaker: Michelle Johnson, “Lessons learned from deploying therapy and assistive robots in low resource community settings”
9:00 AM to 9:25 AM

Foundation Models in Multi-Robot Systems

Invited Speaker: M. Ani Hsieh, 9:05 AM to 9:30 AM, “Physics Foundation Models for Multi-Robot Autonomy: From Team-Level Sensing to Guaranteed-Safe Motion”
Organizer: Vijay Kumar
Accepted Paper: Multi-Robot Formation Coordination with Verified Agentic LLM Planning
Jinyuan Zhang, Yuwei Wu, Guangyao Shi, Jonathan Diller, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Vijay Kumar

Embodied Neuro-Symbolic AI for Reliable and Safe Robotics (ReS AI)

Invited Speaker: Jiayuan Mao
9:10 AM to 9:30 AM
Accepted Paper: Learning to Coach: A Structured Framework for Human Skill Development
Wei Wang, Enlin Gu, Antonio Loquercio, Haimin Hu, Rahul Mangharam

Space Robotics Workshop (SRW): Space Exploration & Sustained Operations Beyond Earth

Invited Speaker: Cynthia Sung, “TRUSSES: Temporarily, Robots Unite to Surmount Sandy Entrapments, then Separate”
9:25 AM to 9:50 AM

Compositional Learning in the Era of Scaling in Robotics

Invited Speaker: Jiayuan Mao, 11:00 AM to 11:25 AM
Invited Speaker: Eric Eaton, 11:50 AM to 12:15 PM

Reproducing Robot Manipulation: Developing Guidelines to Improve Accessibility and Reproducibility of Open-Source

Invited Speaker: Rachel Holladay
3:45 PM to 4:05 PM

Hybrid Architectures for Embodied Autonomy: Bridging Learning, Planning, and Control

Invited Speaker: Michael Posa, 2:30 PM to 3:00 PM, “The data-control sandwich: towards pretty-good robots that work all the time”
Invited Speaker: Nadia Figueroa, 4:00 PM to 4:30 PM
Spotlight Paper: A Reachability-based Safety Certificate for Dynamical System Motion Policies
Aditya Vats, Tianyi Xia, Nadia Figueroa
Accepted Paper: Learning to Coach: A Hybrid Architecture for Human Skill Development
Wei Wang, Enlin Gu, Antonio Loquercio, Haimin Hu, Rahul Mangharam

Soft Robotics in Unstructured Environments: From the Human Body to the Deep Sea

Invited Speaker: Cynthia Sung
4:55 PM to 5:20 PM

Tightly Coupled Physical Interaction and Collaboration in Multi-Robot Systems

Organizers: Yuwei Wu, Jonathan Diller, Vijay Kumar

9:00 AM

Making Imitation Learning Faster and Leaner

IMLE-VLA: Fast Single-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Policies
Kian Hosseinkhani, Qinhe Peng, George Shramko, Mehran Aghabozorgi, Jianing Qian, Tristan Engst, Alireza Moazeni, Dinesh Jayaraman, Ke Li

9:15 AM

Verification and Safety for LLM-Guided Planning

Safety Guardrails for LLM-Enabled Robots
Zachary Ravichandran, Alexander Robey, Vijay Kumar, George J. Pappas, Hamed Hassani

9:26 AM

Safe and Predictive Robot Navigation

Proactive Local-Minima-Free Robot Navigation: Blending Motion Prediction with Safe Control
Yifan Xue, Ze Zhang, Knut Akesson, Nadia Figueroa

10:01 AM

Blending Learning and Optimization in Trajectory Planning

MIGHTY: Hermite Spline-Based Efficient Trajectory Planning
Kota Kondo, Yuwei Wu, Vijay Kumar, Jonathan How

10:08 AM

Snake and Modular Robot Locomotion

Design and Kinematics of CHAMPS: A Configurable, Highly-Articulated, Multi-Purpose Snake
Haitham Alshehri, Nils Roede, Andrew Yu, Mark Yim

2:52 PM

Soft Robot Actuation

Continuous Adhesive Tape Based Steering for Vine Robots Via Wrinkle Induction
Hanmo Liu, Hannah Youssef, Zimu Yang, Ethan Liu, Sonal Sukhatme, Mark Yim

3:27 PM

Best Paper / Best Student Paper Award – 1

Flatness-Preserving Residual Learning for Real-Time Tight Quadrotor Formation Flight
Pei-An Hsieh, Fengjun Yang, Nikolai Matni, M. Ani Hsieh

9:00 AM to 12:30 PM

Robotics Education Forum
IROS 2026

Competitions Panel – Panelist: Rahul Mangharam

Presentation: Learning Management System for RAS
Robotics University, Rahul Mangharam

9:11 AM

IROS Best Paper Award on Robot Mechanisms and Design

Design, Modeling, and Performance of a Robotic Zipper for Self-Donning Clothing
Amanda Weckerly, Wooseok Kim, Megan Coram, Ellen Li, Sophie Lin, Gabriel Unger, Isabella Szabo, Allison M. Okamura, Cynthia Sung

9:11 AM

Taming Complex Constraints in Real-Time Planning

STL-SVPIO: Signal Temporal Logic Guided Stein Variational Path Integral Optimization
Hongrui Zheng, Zirui Zang, Ahmad Amine, Cristian Ioan Vasile, Rahul Mangharam

9:12 AM

Building Safety into Imitation Learning

Safe MPC Alignment with Human Directional Feedback
Zhixian Xie, Wenlong Zhang, Yi Ren, Zhaoran Wang, George J. Pappas, Wanxin Jin

9:22 AM

Taming Complex Constraints in Real-Time Planning

SPAR: Scalable LLM-Based PDDL Domain Generation for Aerial Robotics
Songhao Guang, Yuwei Wu, Guangyao Shi, Gaurav S. Sujhatme, Vijay Kumar

9:37 AM

Object Geometry Perception in Degraded Visual Conditions

Object Reconstruction under Occlusion with Generative Priors and Contact-Induced Constraints
Minghan Zhu, Zhiyi Wang, Qihang Sun, Maani Ghaffari, Michael Posa

10:21 AM

Engineering Safer, Faster Motion Planning

Safe Planning in Unknown Environments Using Conformalized Semantic Maps
David Smith Sundarsingh, Yifei Li, Tianji Tang, George J. Pappas, Nikolay Atanasov, Yiannis Kantaros

3:42 PM

Multi-Robot Collaboration and Exploration

Heterogeneous Robot Collaboration in Unstructured Environments with Grounded Generative Intelligence
Zachary Ravichandran, Fernando Cladera, Ankit Prabhu, Jason Hughes, Carlos Nieto-Granda, Varun Murali, Camillo Jose Taylor, George J. Pappas, Vijay Kumar

10:27 AM

Engineering New Forms of Robot Locomotion

CHUTNI: Compensated Holonomic Uneven Terrain Isolator
Giuseppe Sutera, Francesco Cancelliere, Aniket Datar, Cedric Thomas Sebastien Hollande, Kartik Virmani, Anuj Pokhrel, Dario Calogero Guastella, Giovanni Muscato, Mark Yim, Xuesu Xiao

2:52 PM

Differentiable Structures for Robust Control

AD-MPCC: Adaptive Differentiable Model Predictive Contouring Control for Autonomous Racing
Nam Nguyen, Thanh Binh Nguyen, Ahmad Amine, Thanh Vo-Duy, Rahul Mangharam, Truong Xuan Nghiem

3:03 PM

Coordinating Physical Collaboration in Human-Robot Teams

RoSHI: A Versatile Robot-Oriented Suit for Human Data in The-Wild
Wenjing Mao, Jefferson Ng, Luyang Hu, Daniel Gehrig, Antonio Loquercio

3:45 PM

Learned Reasoning and Dynamics Models in Robotics

PIP-LLM: Integrating PDDL-Integer Programming with LLMs for Coordinating Multi-Robot Teams Using Natural Language
Guangyao Shi, Yuwei Wu, Vijay Kumar, Guarav Sukhatme

Contact & Learning: Is the structure of contact still useful for solving manipulation and locomotion challenges?

Invited Speaker: Michael Posa
4:15 PM to 4:45 PM

3rd Workshop on AI Meets Autonomy: Vision, Language, and Autonomous Systems

Accepted paper: Scalable LLM-based PDDL Domain Generation for Aerial Robotics
Songhao Huang, Yuwei Wu, Guangyao Shi, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Vijay Kumar

4th Workshop on Nonverbal Cues for Human-Robot Cooperative Intelligence

Flash talk: Level-Aware AI Coaching for Human Skill Development
Wei Wang, Enlin Gu, Antonio Loquercio, Haimin Hu, Rahul Mangharam
10:02 to 10:07 AM

AI and the Verification of Autonomous Systems

Invited Speaker: George Pappas
3:55 PM to 4:30 PM

IROS 2026 Tutorial – Learning-to-Optimize for Control in Robotics

Organizers: Rahul Mangharam, Viet-Anh Le, Ahmad Amine

Multi-Robot Systems at Scale: Challenges and Opportunities

Invited Speaker: M. Ani Hsieh
Invited Panelist: Nadia Figueroa

The SOFT Frontier 4: Intelligent Interactions in Soft Robotics

Invited Speaker: Cynthia Sung

Learning and Formal Methods for Robotics

Invited Junior Research Talk: Yuwei Wu, “Abstractions for Learning and Formal Reasoning in Trustworthy Robot Autonomy”
2:15 PM to 2:35 PM

Neuro-Symbolic AI for Intelligent Robots: Integrating LLMs, Knowledge Graphs, & Automated Reasoning

Invited Speaker: Jiayuan Mao, “Learning, Reasoning, and Planning with Neuro-Symbolic Concepts”
2:35 PM to 3:05 PM

The 31st RoboRacer Autonomous Racing Competition

Organizers: Rahul Mangharam, Ahmad Amine, Cedric Hollande
September 27th to 30th, 2026